The Nunes Family

The name Núñez was born in the linguistic matrix of the medieval Iberian peninsula, where the anthroponymic system combined a given name and a patronymic of filiation. The given name Nuño, widely borne in Castile and León during the High Middle Ages, gave rise through suffixation to the form Núñez, "son of Nuño." This structure, common to names like Rodríguez ("son of Rodrigo") or Fernández ("son of Fernando"), makes Núñez a pure product of Hispanic Romanity. Toponyms bear witness to this, such as Fernán Núñez in Andalusia, which attests to the antiquity and diffusion of the name.

On a deeper etymological level, hypotheses diverge regarding the root of Nuño. Reference works signal an uncertain origin and propose Latin filiations. According to lexicographers, the name Núñez is a surname of Spanish origin derived from the medieval given name Nuño, meaning "son of Nuño," with the root name Nuño itself stemming from the Latin Nonius or perhaps from a pre-Roman Iberian substrate. This uncertainty is nothing exceptional: many medieval Iberian given names combine a Latin heritage and earlier layers that are poorly documented.

One must here distinguish the name as such from its identity charge. Núñez, like most Castilian patronyms of filiation, was first and foremost a Christian name, widely distributed throughout the peninsula's population. Its presence in a family does not in itself signal Jewish ancestry. It is only at the intersection of the history of the conversos that the name acquires its specific Sephardic dimension. As scholarship on the Sephardic experience has shown, the Jews of the peninsula lived in full interweaving with Christian and Muslim societies, sharing language, onomastics, and material culture, which explains why many Jewish surnames are indistinguishable, on a strictly linguistic plane, from the names of the surrounding population [Leroy, 1986].

It is this porosity that prepares the subsequent destiny of the name: borne by families Christian for a long time as well as by converted Jewish families, Núñez becomes a border-name, whose belonging only biographical and communal context allows one to determine.

The Decisive Turning Point in the History of the Name Nunez

The decisive turning point in the history of the name Nunez unfolds between the late fourteenth century and the late fifteenth. The pogroms of 1391, followed by forced preaching and discriminatory measures, precipitated tens of thousands of Iberian Jews toward baptism. These converts, called conversos, cristãos-novos ("new Christians") or, in a pejorative manner, marranes, most often retained the name they bore — or adopted one, chosen from among the Christian patronyms in use. It is in this context that lexicography records the existence of a Jewish Nunez, distinguished by its trajectory from the Christian Núñez: an adoption, at the moment of conversion to Catholicism, of the Spanish patronym derived from the given name Nuño.

Even before the massive conversion, the name appears in the circle of Iberian courts. Reference works signal the presence of eminent Jewish personalities bearing this name in the fifteenth century. Thus, according to onomastic sources, Jacob Ibn Nunez, physician to King Henry IV of Castile and rabbi, was charged in 1474 by his master with conveying to Segovia the taxes collected by the Jewish communities. This function — court physician and fiscal officer of the community — illustrates the position of intermediary that certain eminent Jewish families occupied on the eve of expulsion. It also says something more profound: the notion of fiscal justice, the fact of serving as an honest intermediary between the crown and the communities, partakes of that ideal of tsedek — justice — which Jewish tradition considers one of the cardinal virtues of public life. Jacob Ibn Nunez embodied it in the perilous conditions of pre-expulsion Castile.

The expulsion of 1492 in Castile and Aragon, followed by forced conversion in Portugal in 1497, radically transformed the situation. Part of those bearing the name departed into exile to remain Jewish; another remained in place under a Christian identity, while maintaining, for some, a clandestine Judaism. This bifurcation lies at the heart of the Marrano experience, which recent historiography has emphasized was neither uniform nor linear: the refoundation of Sephardic Judaism after 1492 was a long, heterogeneous, and often improvised process, in which religious identities were recomposed according to the host lands and generations [Ray, 2013]. The Nunez of the diaspora belong to this history of recomposition, where the name becomes at once a vestige of lost Iberia and the vehicle of an identity reinvention.

The surname Nunez crosses exile bearing a cultural treasure: language. Sephardic families carried with them the Spanish of the late fifteenth century, which, frozen and enriched through contact with their host lands, became Judeo-Spanish — the ladino or djudezmo of the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean, and the Judeo-Portuguese of Atlantic communities. This language is the vehicle through which names like Nunez were transmitted, pronounced and written across generations. Linguistic studies have shown that Judeo-Spanish preserved archaic traits of medieval Iberian language, making it a living repository of the Castilian of the expulsion [Sephiha, 1986].

In the Ottoman and Balkan sphere, this vernacular enjoyed remarkable vitality, notably in Istanbul and Salonique, where it served as a community language for centuries [Bornes-Varol, 2008]. Judeo-Spanish dictionaries from the turn of the twentieth century, such as that of Yehuda A. de Yoná which set Judeo-Spanish, French and Turkish side by side, testify to the rootedness of this language in the daily life of Eastern Sephardic communities [de Yoná, 1902]. Likewise, in the Atlantic space, the coexistence of ladino and Judeo-Portuguese reflects the dual origin — Castilian and Portuguese — of the exiles, many of whom passed through Portugal before reaching Northern Europe [Quintana, 2010].

It is here that tradition and archive answer one another. Sephardic family memory frequently assigns names the status of a relic of Sefarad, transmitted as a title of antiquity. The linguistic archive confirms this continuity: the persistence of the form Nunez in community registers, ketubot and fiscal lists of the diasporas attests that the name was indeed preserved, not reconstructed. Research has shown how extensively the Sephardic diaspora wove, after the expulsion, transnational networks that connected communities of East and West, ensuring the circulation of persons, names and memories [Benbassa, 1993]. The name Nunez, present in both worlds, is a marker of this.

One of the most documented chapters in the history of the name concerns the Nunez Marranos of northwestern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fleeing Portuguese and Spanish Inquisition, families of cristãos-novos bearing this name settled in the great ports of Atlantic trade — Antwerp, London, Rouen, Bordeaux, Hamburg, then Amsterdam — where they often engaged in international commerce and medicine, before openly returning to Judaism where tolerance permitted.

In London, under the reign of Elisabeth I, a small colony of merchants and physicians of Portuguese origin, outwardly Christian, numbered bearers of the name Nunez, engaged in commerce and sometimes in diplomatic intelligence. In Hamburg and Amsterdam, the reconstitution of an open Jewish life also welcomed Sephardic families of this name. The historiography of Sephardim in central Europe recalls the scale and fragilities of these communities: in the mid-seventeenth century, the Sephardic community of Hamburg numbered seven hundred members, but only one hundred sixteen of them were liable for the communal tax, the others being too poor to pay it. This contrast between a prosperous merchant elite and an impoverished mass characterizes the port diasporas into which the Nunez inserted themselves.

These Atlantic communities did not live in isolation: they constituted the nodes of a vast Sephardic commercial network linking the Mediterranean, northern Europe, and the colonies. Works on the Tuscan port of Livorno have shown how Sephardic families — among whose surnames the Nunez counted — wove relationships of intercultural trust to organize long-distance commerce in the early modern period [Trivellato, 2009]. The name Nunez thus circulates in merchant correspondence, notarial records, and port registers, where it appears as a surname of diasporic commerce.

It is in this same Atlantic space, at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that one of the most accomplished figures of the lineage emerges: David Nunes Torres, whose existence and work merit a chapter unto itself.

Among all documented bearers of the name Nunes, David Nunes Torres holds a singular place. Born around 1660 and died in 1728, he lived at the crossroads of the two great metropolises of Atlantic Sephardic diaspora — Amsterdam and The Hague — and devoted his life to three inseparable vocations: preaching, communal governance, and scholarly work on texts.

The details of his training are unknown, but his writings testify to a classically Sephardic education, rooted both in mastery of Hebrew and in the rhetorical culture of Iberia inherited from the conversos. He was ordained haham — chief rabbi — of the synagogue of the Portuguese community of The Hague, the Kehila of Portuguese Jews established in this city that was then the diplomatic heart of the United Provinces. This position conferred upon him not only religious authority over the local community, but also visibility within the intellectual and institutional network of the Sephardic diaspora.

The Sermões of 1690 and 1691

The first documented work of David Nunes Torres is a collection of sermons in Portuguese, published in Amsterdam in two successive installments, in 1690 and 1691. The full title is Sermões de David Nunes-Torres, Pregador da célebre irmandade de Abi Jetomim, and it was published by the printer Moses Dias, in the Hebrew years 5450 and 5451. The mention of the irmandade de Abi Jetomim — the confraternity for relief of orphans and the poor — immediately situates these sermons in a context of organized charity: David Nunes Torres preached not for an audience of scholars confined to speculation, but for an assembly engaged in the concrete care of the community's most vulnerable members.

The genre of the sermon in Portuguese in Amsterdam was then experiencing its full flourishing. Sephardic literature in Amsterdam had developed an original oratorical art, heir to both Renaissance Iberian preachers and the rabbinical tradition of derashah, in which the preacher commented on a scriptural verse to draw from it a moral and religious lesson suited to the circumstances of his audience. The sermons of David Nunes Torres are fully inscribed in this tradition: their publication in two consecutive years indicates a regular practice of the pulpit and recognition of his talent by the community.

It must be emphasized what this double publication represents in light of the values that the Jewish tradition has always attached to the spoken word. The derashah — the public homily — is far more than a rhetorical exercise: it is an act of communal teaching, a sharing of Talmudic and exegetical knowledge with all members of the kehila, lettered or not. To preach for the confraternity of orphans and the poor is to join gesture to word: charity (tsedaka) is not limited to material alms, it also includes the gift of knowledge and the strengthening of communal bonds through speech. These sermons are thus a trace of a commitment to ahavat Israel — love of the people of Israel as a whole, not merely its learned elite.

The Edition of the Hebrew Bible with Rashi and the Vulgate

The other major work of David Nunes Torres is of an altogether different nature and ambition. He prepared and published an edition of the Hebrew Bible accompanied by the commentary of Rashi and the Vulgate — the Latin translation of the Bible established by Saint Jerome in the fourth century, the official translation of the Catholic Church. This editorial enterprise is remarkable in more than one respect.

Rashi — Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (1040–1105) — is the preeminent commentator of the biblical and Talmudic text in medieval and modern Judaism. His commentary on the Torah associates literal sense (pshat) with midrashic traditions, and for nine centuries it has constituted the necessary point of entry for all study of the sacred text. To edit Rashi in the diaspora is to accomplish an act of transmission: to make accessible to the community the primary instrument of its own reading of Scripture.

Yet David Nunes Torres does not stop there. He adjoins to this commentary the Latin Vulgate, that is, the Christian version of the biblical text. This editorial choice is decisive and merits attention. It is neither a concession to the surrounding culture nor an act of inverted proselytism. In the context of the Sephardic diaspora at the turn of the eighteenth century, this juxtaposition responds to a precise intellectual imperative: that of dialogue and rigorous confrontation of interpretive traditions. The conversos returned to Judaism had often grown up in a Christian culture and read the Bible in Latin; their reintegration into Judaism also passed through a clarification of the differences between the two textual traditions. In placing side by side the Hebrew text, Rashi's commentary, and the Vulgate, David Nunes Torres offered his readers the instruments for a lucid comparison, not a confusion.

This gesture illustrates a virtue rarely named but constantly present in the intellectual history of the Sephardic world: the capacity to hold together fidelity to the Torah and openness to alterity, to engage with the other not to dissolve into it, but to define oneself more clearly. This disposition — this relationship to textual otherness, if one may say so — is one of the deepest traits of Iberian Sephardic Judaism, heir to the medieval convivencia where Arab philosophy, Christian thought, and rabbinical tradition had nourished one another mutually.

A Library, an Inventory, a Heritage

After the death of David Nunes Torres in 1728, his heirs had a Cathalogus librorum — a catalogue of his personal library — drawn up. This document, published in The Hague in 1728 under the title Cathalogus librorum quibus (dum viveret) usus est vir admodum reverendus David Nunes Torres, olim rabbinus synagogae judaicae lusitanorum Hagae-Comitis, constitutes precious testimony to the breadth of his reading and his interests. The Latin formula vir admodum reverendus — "a man most reverend" — indicates the esteem in which he was held beyond his own community.

This catalogue reveals moreover a fact of the highest historiographical importance: David Nunes Torres possessed the sole known copy of the Exame das tradições fariseas by Uriel da Costa — the work through which this Marrano philosopher had, in the early seventeenth century, radically called into question the authority of oral tradition and the Talmud in the name of a return to the written text of the Torah alone. That the haham of The Hague preserved this incendiary work in his private library does not mean he shared its theses — the Sephardic community of Amsterdam had pronounced the excommunication (herem) of Uriel da Costa. But this fact bears witness to a form of intellectual integrity: to preserve the texts that disturb, to read them, not to erase them. The honesty of knowledge also passes through the preservation of what contests it.

Iberian colonial expansion and Atlantic commerce carried the name Nunez to the Americas, where it followed two parallel destinies. On the one hand, as a widespread Spanish surname, it spread throughout colonial Latin America without necessary connection to Judaism. On the other hand, as a Marrano name, it accompanied the migration of cristãos-novos to Brazil, the Caribbean, New Amsterdam, and later to the British colonies of North America, where several of these families returned to Judaism.

The history of Sephardic presence in America is closely tied to these trajectories. The earliest Jewish communities in English and Dutch colonies formed largely from Sephardic families of Iberian and Portuguese origin, who reconstituted synagogues of Portuguese rite in Recife, Curaçao, Jamaica, New York, Newport, and then in the American South. The name Nunez appears among the surnames of this founding diaspora, notably in Georgia, where Sephardic families participated in the establishment of the colony of Savannah in the eighteenth century. Historiography of Sephardic presence in the United States has emphasized the profoundly diasporic character of this community, whose identity was constructed through mobility between continents rather than in a single rootedness [Ben-Ur, 2009].

This American chapter also illustrates the complexity of colonial encounters. In the early modern Atlantic world, Sephardim — merchants, planters, artisans — were active participants in slaveholding societies and colonial economies, and their history is inscribed in the racial and religious hierarchies of the time [Schorsch, 2004]. The Nunez of America, in this regard, cannot be separated from the broader context of the Atlantic empires in which they lived, sometimes prospered, and maintained themselves as Jews at the cost of constant adaptation.

If the Atlantic trajectory of the surname Nunez is best documented by merchant and inquisitorial archives, the patronym also appears in Eastern and Maghrebi diasporas, where its presence stems less from notarial sources than from community transmission and late civil registers. Onomastic repertories explicitly signal a North African settlement: the name NUNEZ is attested in Tunisia, and, with the filiation marker, in the form BENOUNES in the Algiers department. This adaptation — the Hebrew-Arabic prefix Ben- ("son of") affixed to the Iberian name — is a characteristic phenomenon among Sephardim established in the Maghreb, where Romance onomastics merged into the Judeo-Arabic linguistic fabric.

This intersection illustrates how a single patronym could be re-encoded through contact with different languages. In the Jewish world of the Arabic sphere, Judeo-Arabic was, like Judeo-Spanish in the Orient, a vector of identity and learned culture [Ben-Shammai, 2004]. Documentation from the Cairo Genizah revealed the extraordinary density of exchanges — commercial, familial, rabbinic — that connected Jewish communities around the Mediterranean over the long term [Goitein, 1993]. Although the name Nunez belongs to an Iberian corpus postdating the great Genizah collections, this documentation illuminates the social framework in which Sephardic families, arriving after 1492, were inserted into a preexisting Mediterranean Judaism.

Here, Memory and archive dialogue without always coinciding. Family tradition preserves the memory of an Iberian origin, while the attested forms — Nunez, Benounes — testify to a linguistic acclimatization whose precise chronology remains, for lack of ancient documents, largely conjectural. The status of this chapter is therefore that of transmitted knowledge, which late archive comes to illuminate without entirely establishing it.

The last lesson of this inquiry is methodological. The name Nunez / Núñez is today one of the most widespread surnames in the Hispanic-speaking area, borne by millions of people in Spain and Latin America, the vast majority of whom have no connection whatsoever to Judaism. The confusion between the old Christian Núñez and the Sephardic Marrano Nunez constitutes the principal pitfall of any family genealogy. This is why reference lexicography takes care to distinguish the two strata: the Spanish patronym derived from Nuño, on the one hand, and its adoption by Jews at the time of conversion, on the other [Last name NUNEZ — Geneanet].

This duality imposes rigorous caution. The mere bearing of the name proves neither Jewish ancestry nor Christian ancestry: one must resort to communal sources — synagogue registers, ketubot, lists of the Portuguese nación, Inquisitorial trials, cemeteries — to establish a Sephardic lineage. The learned categories moreover recall that Sephardic surnames are borne by Jews who historically lived in the Iberian Peninsula before moving, notably, toward the Maghreb. The name Nunez indeed belongs to this corpus, but only for a portion of its bearers.

In the case of David Nunes Torres, the sources leave no ambiguity: the two installments of his sermons, published by Moses Dias in Amsterdam in 5450 and 5451 of the Hebrew era, and the biblical edition he prepared, are documents of Sephardic intellectual life, anchored in a community whose Jewish identity was public and assumed. They remind us that genealogical research finds its strongest proofs not in the etymology of the name, but in the works and deeds that individuals have left behind them.

The posterity of the name is finally read in contemporary genealogical institutions, which gather and cross-reference these traces. Jewish genealogy circles regularly publish works devoted to Sephardic families bearing this name, a sign of the vitality of research and Memory — thus the journal of a Jewish genealogy circle mentions contributions relating to the Nunez family [La revue du Cercle — Cercle de Généalogie Juive]. It is in this back-and-forth between documentary archive and family memory that the honest history of a patronym is constructed, even today.

The name Nunez condenses, in itself alone, an essential part of Sephardic history. Born in the Romance matrix of the Iberian peninsula as a patronymic derived from the given name Nuño, it was borne by Christian families as by Jewish families, before becoming, through forced conversions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, one of the emblematic names of the Marrano diaspora [Q37519592 — Wikidata]. From the Castile of court physicians to the Atlantic ports of London, Hamburg and Amsterdam, from Portuguese synagogues of the New World to Judeo-Arab communities of the Maghreb where it became Benounes, the name followed the routes of Sephardic exile while adapting itself to each language and each host land.

The contribution of sources from the Zakhor Corpus — the Sermões of David Nunes Torres (1690–1691) and the biblical edition he prepared — now makes it possible to name more precisely what this lineage will have, among all others, best expressed. It is not commerce nor survival in hostile lands, though it excelled at both. It is the value of transmitted knowledge: the conviction, carried by a haham who preached for orphans and the poor, that Torah is not clerical property but a common good; that the commentary of Rashi deserves to be placed in all hands; that confrontation with the Christian Vulgate, far from weakening faith, clarifies and strengthens it; that keeping in one's library the most controversial book of the community belongs to intellectual honesty.

In this, David Nunes Torres — and, through him, the Nunes lineage in what it carried of greatest accomplishment — embodies what Judaism calls talmud Torah in its broadest sense: not study for study's sake, but the putting of knowledge at the service of the community, of the poor as of the learned, of those returning to Judaism as of those born in the faith. It is a tsedaka of the intelligence, which joins the material charity of the irmandade de Abi Jetomim to the intellectual generosity of learned publication.

This journey teaches finally the necessity of holding together two demands: humility before homonymy — for not every Núñez is Sephardic — and the recognition of a real memory, that of families who have preserved this name as a living link with Sefarad. Between the archive, which documents mercantile and inquisitorial trajectories, and tradition, which transmits the Iberian origin, the name Nunez remains an open historical object, each branch of which calls for its own inquiry. It is not a mere word: it is the sediment of a long crossing, that of a people who, dispossessed of their land, carried their names as viaticum — and put their knowledge at the service of those who remained.